


Needle Shy

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Canon, M/M, Mentions of het, Mentions of marriage, Other, Post Burials era, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 11:49:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4018654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>three different blackouts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Needle Shy

**Author's Note:**

> I know its been a long time, sorry. I wrote this because I can't stop thinking about Davey blacking out his tattoos :( That's pretty much it. It's about permanence and impermanence, like all my Burials era fic.

When the blackout hits Loz Feliz, you think the timing of it all seems cosmic, and you resent yourself for feeling that way. But you resent yourself for so many of the ways you feel it’s reflexive at this point, just the automatic kick of your leg when you’re struck upon your knee in the right place. It almost passes through you, unfelt. 

There is no flicker, no warning. One moment you’re surrounded by the comforting and omnipresent whir of mechanized existence, the hum of the untouched minibar and the lazy slice of the fan, and then suddenly it all ends. A blanched silence drops into the room and you and Jade both look up from your laptops, locking eyes for too long in the new, muted darkness. 

“The power went out,” Jade says, obvious, unnecessary. It irritates you, but you would have been the one to say it if he hadn’t. You are always on opposite ends now, filling graves the other has dug into himself, taking stances the other rejects. _Like that Rutger Howard movie,_ you told him once, _where he’s a wolf by night and she’s a bird by day, and they can never touch, eternally out of reach, cursed_. You know the name of the movie, you both do, but Jade had acted offended that you didn’t remember it in the moment you chose to compare your fates. He didn’t miss the point, but he pretended he did, thus proving it. This is the way you are now. 

He stands up and walks to the edge of the room which is strewn with a tangle of cords and chargers like a mess of reeds, snakes, veins. It reminds you of games you used to play as a kid, Chutes and Ladders, hopscotch of jumprope and chanting _Don’t step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back_. You think of falling into a sea of imagined lava, and watch Jade play with the light switch and dimmer, flicking it on and off rapidly, uselessly. “Dead,” he says, and you grind your teeth at him, even though half of the chargers are yours and your laptop is open and glowing, too, and you have just as many reasons to hate yourself as you have to hate him. 

“Huh,” you say, sighing an irritated sigh. “Well. I don’t have pen and paper, obviously, so.” There is nothing after the _so_. You study the shape of Jade, his body like a streak of darkness upon the white wallpaper, now tinted blue-grey without all the lights reflecting off of it. He’s like an elongated, broken, letter S, bent at the shoulders and hunched as he scrolls through his phone, this thing which has permanently altered his anatomy since he left you over a decade ago. 

“I guess it’s an actual blackout, not just us, a good chunk of the city doesn’t have power. They’re working on it,” He drawls, rubbing absently at his arm, where her nickname is tattooed. It’s a gesture you hate, even if you imagine he is trying to rub it off, smudge it to meaninglessness. One time you suggested this to him, in a fit of rage most likely, and he had said, no, that’s you Dave. That’s you. It’s an argument you play over and over in your head, even though it is years old. You wonder if he remembers it at all. 

“I guess we could wait, see if it’s gonna come back on,” you suggest. You don’t like typing lyrics on the notes app of your phone, it seems too small and makes your brow furrow, which cements the lines you hate into your skin. Most hotels stopped having those little monogrammed pads of paper beside the phone years ago, one obsolete amenity after another, and your laptop is, unfortunately, minutes away from dying. There is nothing else to write on. 

Jade’s laptop is low on power, too, and you both feel stranded without these things. The you of five, six years ago would have laughed self-righteously about this, but you’ve caved to the sway of technology lately, and the only _I told you so_ is internal and self-effacing. One of one hundred feelings you resent, coming and going, a distant acknowledgment that you’ve changed, decayed, atrophied. These are the things you always accuse Jade of having done, but you are just as loathsome. Perhaps more so, seeing as you are in denial, whereas he tattoos it on his arm and does not try and rub it away, no matter how you try and rewrite every movement of his sick, sad body.

The room gets hot without the fan pushing air around. No music was coming earlier and it’s certainly not coming now. It doesn’t feel like a loss. Today was a long shot, anyway. The real reason you’re here together in his hotel room with no light and no white noise remains unspoken, unrealized, uncertain. The blackout has stolen your guise of propriety, and now you are left with yourself, with each other. With a perpetual insomnia ache in you solar-plexus, made worse by the grief that everything between you, every broken promise and every lost pick and every forgotten monogrammed pad of paper by every forgotten hotel phone, is not the same as it was. Your hand flutters to your chest, a reflex. 

Jade returns to the couch and shuts his laptop with a snap before meeting your eyes again. “Yeah, thats fine. We can give if a rest. Are you hungry? Do you want to go out?” 

Of course you don’t want to go out. You don’t want anything possible or reasonable from Jade, you want to go back in time with him, you want to forget he ever existed, you want to die with his fist around your throat. This is the way it is, the way is has always been, and the way it will be forevermore, so there is no way you can respond, really. All you can do is stand opposite him, fill the graves he digs and rejects the stances he takes. It’s easier than wanting to share those graves. You stretch along the couch, suddenly exhausted now that there are no hotel lights shining down upon you, no fan and no air conditioning. “I’m not hungry, no.”

What you are is very, very tired. You used to try to strive to surpass your own humanity, back when you were young and ambitious and thought love was the thing that would save you. Since then, the fire inside you has faded and you’ve become like everyone else. You depend on your machines to remember things for you, you depend on them to write, to breathe. So now, without them to keep you awake and thrumming, humanity never sleeping, your eyes grow heavy and your heart slows. 

You’re tired, tired enough to sleep, which is something you so rarely feel. Last night was only a few fitful hours, blurring into countless other nights just like it. But here, now, on this low-slung couch with its stainless steel legs, you want to close your eyes. Sink to the cushion and rest your head, cheek sticking to black matte vinyl as you drift into dreamlessness in this white-walled hotel suite with its plush carpet strewn in wire capillaries. 

You’re not sure if the forced unplugging or Jade is to blame for this sudden wave of exhaustion. Sometimes just being around him spurs something in you, drives you to a sick, habitual comfort like muscle memory. You can feel him like some indelible stain on you, studying you with eyes not as changed, decayed, atrophied as you sometimes pretend they are. 

“You look hungry,” he says, noncommittally. 

You shake your head. “Just tired.” 

You think of the hundreds of composition notebooks, their yellowed paper and endless ink scrawls, that you and Jade filled to a weeping brim a decade ago. You think of the space they take up in your storage unit in Torrence, like the space October takes up on your arms. You wish you could burn them to ashes, but you know there are things you will never give up. You think of them, and grieve for Jade’s eyes. Their sameness, their difference. 

“I feel like I could sleep,” you confess, yawning, wiping a fine layer of perspiration from your brow with the cuff of your sleeve.

Jade looks away. This is not the first time this has happened, a sudden deluge of exhaustion striking you in his presence. You wonder if there have ever been men so parched they drank themselves to death when they finally found water. You wonder how often the very thirsty drown. 

“You want to lie down?” Jade asks, carding a hand through his hair in this way that almost looks nervous, like he fears the precipice you might be approaching together. “There’s a bed. You can sleep, I’ll wake you up when the power comes back on. We can try to write then if you want.” 

“And what will you do?” You ask carefully. 

_Leave_ is likely what Jade is thinking, what he probably wants to do. But its a word you do not allow him to use freely around you, so he doesn’t say so. He also knows the possibility of you sleeping disappears without him there to oversee it, without his quiet heartbeat to become the electronic thrum the blackout has stolen. He knows because he is the same. 

“I’ll hang out,” He says. You both know what it means. 

You told him once some years ago, during one of many pitiable two am phone calls he only answered because he feared you might have been dying, _when I can’t sleep, I still imagine you’re here with me. Even when I hate you, even when I hate you for the whole day, I come back to bed at night and it’s erased. It’s the only thing that ever works. Pathetic, right?_ And Jade had laughed, a sad, dry laugh, and replied, _no. I do the same thing. Sometimes_. 

You have asked him so many other nights, during other fights, _how can you sleep? How can you fucking sleep at night, Jade?_ You forget that you actually know the answer to this question, that he told you. Sometimes. 

Jade studies you across and couch, and then sets his laptop down carefully on the carpet, like he is making a decision. You’re too limp and exhausted to move, you are mired in an inescapable past so you just watch him, dazed, as he leans across the divide between your bodies with an outstretched hand, and touches you. It feels impossible. Like going back in time, like forgetting he ever existed, like dying by his fist. You close your eyes, and let it happen. 

Jade pushes a warm, damp palm up under your shirt, callous snagging on skin and silk as he thumbs over your ribs, and higher still to the bones of your sternum and the lines of muscle in your chest. “Here or the bed?” he asks, in a voice muffled by the hem of your pants, by the dusting of hair beneath your navel. You reach for his arm, where her nickname is tattooed, and try to rub it away. 

“I don’t care,” you say, pulling him up to you with a fist in his hair. “Wherever.” 

In the darkness, you lie side by side on the narrow couch, tangled together like reeds, snakes, veins. His breath smells like coffee and toothpaste as it comes out in shallow, even exhalations across your lips, and you breathe it in each time. He touches you idly, rubbing his fingers over the newly shaved parts of your scalp, down your sides, dipping just under the hem of your briefs to where the skin is warm and used and he touches you there, too, like he’s blind and reading his oldest and most treasured book in braille. 

You don’t want him to be blind, you do not want to be old or a treasure, you want to be the world and every life and death inside it, as you once were. But you will take what you can get. 

You don’t fuck today. Both of you half-sleep, so that together you make some kind of whole, dozing and nodding off into each other. You count each time he twitches against you and the tremors feel like moths, memories you thought once dead flickering to life in their jar, the dull thud of wings on glass. You don’t dream, which is exactly what you want, as close to death as you can get. 

The power comes back on and startles you both from sleep with the sound of so many waking machines, all whirring to life so that they can bear down upon you, watch and judge and archive and catalogue. You stay on the couch while Jade gets up suddenly, creases in the skin of face from your shirt, tattoos which will fade. You rub your arms, cold under the fan now, and watch him plug in his phone and power it up. “Blackout’s over,” he says eventually, as if he needed his phone to tell him that, and the sudden light spilling into the cracks between you and forcing your bodies apart was not enough. 

You blink sleep out of your eyes and trace the shape of him with your fingertips in the air just in front of you, a ghost Jade, a shadow. _Eternally out of reach, cursed_ , you think, hating how the ache in your chest is always worse after you sleep during the day and you _know_ that, you know that, but still, you fall for the trap, every time. 

\---

You’ve blacked before, back when you ate too little and worked out too much. But you could always feel it coming on, the flickers of white closing in on you, shimmering like you imagine a mirage might if you were dragging yourself on hands and knees through a desert in search of water. 

But this time, it feels different. It hits you like a fist, the same sensation of sudden, room-spinning dizziness you remember from all the times you were kicked in the head by stage-divers at shows as a kid. Only there is no show, no stage and no crowd. You’re alone with Jade, fighting a fight you have fought one million times before, in the hallway between your bedroom and the stairwell which you are blocking so he cannot push past you and leave again, like he always does. 

“No,” you say, bracing your arms in the doorjamb, watching him pace wildly in your bedroom, snagging his fingers through his hair. You have seen him do this a million times before, it’s as etched into your memory as the birthmark on the inside of his thigh, as the way his lips look parted over promises he cannot keep. “I don’t want to see her there. You can come without her, or don’t come at all.” 

“You’re fucking unbelievable, Dave,” he snaps without looking at you. You have heard him say this a million times before. It’s one of his favorite things to call you, _unbelievable_ paid for, you can’t change it. It’s already happened, it’s already done,” he tells you, finally raising his eyes and locking them with yours. “You can be an adult about _one_ night.” 

You scoff, a loud, cruel, incredulous noise. You’re about to launch into what an absurd thing it is for him to call _adulthood_ to attention when she is the one who is a child, the one who pouts and throws tantrums and claims Jade like he is some prize she won with her secret vows and ring of light. You are about to, when the blackout hits. Sudden, hard, like you were struck upon your skull with a steel-toed boot and very abruptly you are pitching to your knees while the hallway spins around you in a haze of beige and hardwood. 

His voice sounds far away, underwater. You try to stand up again and take a step towards him so you can back him into your room, into the bed with its sheets still sticky and rumpled from the night before. Blood pounds in your ears, so loud you cannot hear a single thing Jade is saying. His shins come into focus roughly, too close and thin like willow branches. Then there’s nothing but a calm, placating black. 

You come to with Jade’s hands on your shoulders, firm and certain and yearning and you think, _this is what it is to be remembered._ His face swims into your vision, looking very round and very blanched. You think of the full moon, or sand-dollars half-buried in sand. “Dave,” He says carefully, his voice a partial echo. “Are you okay?” You nod. He sounds concerned, leaning into your space as he continues, asking, “can you hear me?” 

It often feels like too much when you touch him, as if you are crossing some unspeakable line in the sand, but it is high tide, and you think blacking out has washed away the rules, making everything shining and slick and reflective with salt and sun and sea foam, so you reach out. 

Your hand, cold and sweat-clammy, closes over his wrist and draws his hand to your mouth. You want to swallow the filth from his nails, you want to drive nails into his palms. You want it to matter than you cannot stand to be around her while she wears that ring, while she stands radiant and golden at his side as you never could, a burning tribute to a whole ocean of things you will never be. “I can hear you,” you tell him. You push all his knuckles down into a fist save for the middle one, which you pull taut like a mast of a tall ship. “Ask me how many fingers you’re holding up,” you tell him. 

He eyes you warily, a tremor to the hand you’re holding for him, but he does as you say. “How many fingers am I holding up?” 

“One,” you announce, the corner of your mouth turning up in spite of yourself, in spite of the gutter you’re both lying in like a silt-choked grave. 

“Good,” he mumbles, fight at least temporarily forgotten. You let his middle finger curl back down towards his palm, the _fuck you_ now implicit, a half-remembered thing. He laughs and it comes out nervous and full full of air. It makes you think of sails billowing, a white too bright to look at, so you close your eyes, 

“No, keep them open,” he tells you. “Aren’t you supposed to keep them open? I feel like I heard that somewhere. I’ve never really seen someone pass out like that before, what happened?” 

“I don’t know,” You admit, settling your head back down into the firmness of the floor, not prepared to try and stand anytime soon, since the room is still spinning with each flickering movement of your eyes. “Why don’t you look it up on your phone?” You ask him. 

Then you both laugh, explosive and real, and you cannot remember the last time the two of you laughed together like this. You grind your skull into the ground, you laugh and laugh until you’re gasping and hiccuping and your abdominals are clenching involuntarily and you’re pale with nausea. When it fades there are tears in the tails of your eyes, and you see them mirrored in Jade’s as he bends down to kiss you, a funny sort of darkness having fallen across him like an eclipse. Your dizziness buckles and grows as he licks desperately into your mouth, tasting like salt and sand, bitter with the fight you have had one million times before. You bite his lips and he makes fists in the skin of your shoulders, too tight to makes fists in, and you are moved to know he’s trying anyway. 

It’s a filthy sort of kiss, wet and open, a mouth he’s sucked you off with before, the same mouth he’s used to bite marks into the backs of your thighs with. It makes your stomach turn and collapse, it tricks your heart into the same sick stuttering it perfected ten years ago. You try and push memories away, and instead just lose yourself in the dark recesses of him, the roof of his mouth and the hollows beneath his clavicles. It is not ten years ago, but you will take when you can get. 

The room spins and spins around you like a broken carnival ride. You want to get off, you don’t want to get off; this is the way things are now. With your hands in his hair and his tongue in your teeth, you think, _this is what it is to be remembered_ Blackness comes and blots things out like the tide washes away lines drawn in sand. The dizziness recedes, but does not go away. You don’t care about the rug burn on your back, you don’t care that it will sting tomorrow in the shower, when you stand beneath a spray too hot and try to burn the wings from your shoulders.

\---

It is all the different ways Jade says _there is nothing permanent, no forever, no eternity_ which makes you finally decide to black out the tattoos on your arms. He is so very certain of the future’s uncertainty, he is so supposedly disbelieving of the indelibility of your shared past, and you will never be able to swallow that. You will never be able to accept his version of your history, Not as long as you have October immortalized in technicolor on your arms, years and years of ink layered thick as blood on a battlefield. Not as long as you have two records and a half-decade of untarnished memories reminding you otherwise.

But you can rewrite the songs, you can question the meaning behind them, wonder how much you were clouded by the terrible glory of finding someone you thought was just like you. Or you can at least _not listen_ to the songs, bury them along with those composition notebooks growing damp and moldy in the storage unit in Torrence. Art from your past is something you can distance yourself from, hide from, bury in brush and set fire to. You relinquish power over it anyway by singing it, giving it away, allowing it to be twisted and interpreted and molded by every person whose ever heard and related to it. It is no longer yours, even if it once was. This is what it means to be an artist. 

Art is one thing, but you cannot siphon the ink from your skin. You cannot peel the scars from your body. It is the thing you live inside of, you are forced to see it every day, forced to scrub the filth from it and stew in the sweat it creates. It is the one thing you cannot escape. 

You _know_ it won’t work, and that is at least part of why you’re doing it. You can black out your past, black out October, cover the whole of those years with an eternal night, but it won’t erase anything. October will remain along with every hour of pain spent immortalizing it, and the past, the past. All it symbolizes, every second spent falling in love with Jade, every pass of every needle, _cannot_ be forgotten. It can only be concealed. You know what lies beneath the spill of black, and so does Jade. Jade knows, and will mourn for it. 

You’re not trying to forget what happened by blacking out your arms, not entirely. You are at least in part proving to Jade that it _cannot_ be done. 

Tattoos hurt worse and worse the older you get, the more they are retouched, the more space you cover. As a kid you always assumed it would get better and you’d eventually grow used to it. That you would build up some tolerance to pain, but you were wrong. You only sit for four hours with Scott before you have you have you stop. _You’re getting needle shy, Dave,_ he told you as he cleaned you up, smearing a layer of ink-streaked vaseline into swollen skin with a black-gloved finger before wrapping a square of cling wrap around your forearm and taping it in place. _We did the outline to that sleeve in what...eight hours? Nine? You took like one break. You were a machine back then. A crazy little machine._

 _No,_ you say, laughing. _I was human, I loved the pain. But now. Now I’m the machine._

 _Always a poet_ , Scott said, sounding sad. You had parted ways with a long hug, and he told you over and over again to stop apologizing, that he didn’t take it personally, that he always hated that Nightmare sleeve anyway because he’d gotten so much better between then and now and it drove him crazy that there was some famous guy walking around with a piece of shit old tattoo on his arm. You understand, because that is what it means to be an artist. You rewrite your old songs, you don’t listen to them. You let them go, and realize they don’t mean anything anymore, they belong to too many people. 

Now, here you are with Jade, and he is so much more angry at you than you could have even imagined, and it is the kind of pain you miss from being tattooed, before you got needle shy. The good, clean, pure pain of being alive. “I just don’t even understand why you’d do that, spend all that money,” Jade told you, running his fingers over black, peeling skin, face crumpled in a disapproving wince. “Your arms were so beautiful.” 

You pull away from him; his touch makes you itch and sting. “Easy for you to say. Your tattoos were always shit, you haven’t touched them up in the last ten years at least. Maybe by comparison my arms were beautiful.” 

He looks up at you, eyes pleading. You’re half in public, at the LAX parking lot because you made him pick you up here, because you knew he would and you had to see his reaction to this as soon as possible, to soothe the terrible ache of it still in your bones, in your tendons every time you flex the fingers of your right arm. “I’m not fucking around, Dave,” he tells you, swallowing noisily, rubbing his temples and staring at you hard from the drivers seat of his enormous SUV which you hate. “I really can’t even believe you did this. You always talked so much shit about people who blacked out their tattoos, you always thought it looked stupid.” 

“Always, ” you snap at him, mocking as you role your sleeves down to conceal the twilight-black still shiny and scaly with newness. “I thought you hated that word.” 

“Fuck you, Dave. I don’t have to sit through this, I can leave you here to call an Uber. I did not agree to come get you here so you could show me this shit,” he says, shoving his sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose, obstructing his eyes from you so you cannot see the wetness gathering at the lower lid But you know it is there, you can hear the raw scrape to his throat. It hurts so good to witness his pain, it makes your heart thrum in your throat, it makes you want to grab him and pull him on top of you and force him to rip the new layer of black away if he hates it so much. 

“You’re being ridiculous,” you tell him thickly, crossing your healing arms. “Why do you care what I do with my body anymore?” 

He makes a sound in his mouth. A stunned, ripped, vulnerable thing that makes you twitch to half hardness. “Are you kidding me?” he asks you. 

“What?” You prompt him. 

“Just...are you fucking kidding me. Of course I have investment in your tattoos, like, I don’t care what you get tattooed, it’s your own body of course, but those...your sleeves, your back. All the shit I helped you decide on or that we talked about or that I _fucking rubbed lotion on when you couldn’t reach_ , it’s all....I don’t know. I think about it, of course I think about it. How could you think I wouldn’t care?” He says desperately. 

Every word hurts like needles hurt when you were twenty and wanted a burning heart on your chest because you were obbsessed with the idea of having a fire inside, and thought Jade was the thing which would feed it, rather than the thing to smother it. Tears spring to your eyes and your throat feels too tight and hot to breathe through, and you love it. You love that Jade can still affirm that you are alive, that you aren’t just a machine. 

Your silence is pissing him off, you can tell because you can feel the warmth radiating from him in waves, you can see the flush on his cheeks and hear his teeth grinding. “Fuck,” he says. You count down, _5, 4, 3_ , and on _2_ , he unbuckles his seatbelt, leans across the gratuitous divide between the driver’s and passenger’s side, and throws you up against the tinted window, sealing your mouths. 

Head cracking against glass, your vision turns white and static for a moment, an you ground yourself in his mouth, snapping at him, digging your teeth into him so hard he has to hiss _stop_ , which you do, but only for a moment. He pins you to the seat with your forearms above your head, digging his nails into tender, scabbed flesh. You cry out, needle shy, hips pushing up against him, things digging into your back and thighs because even giant cars like Jade’s aren’t meant to be fucked in. 

“I hate it,” he snarls into your mouth before struggling to push the sleeve of your jacket up, “I fucking hate it.” Bearing down onto your prone, only half-struggling body, he rolls his brow against the seat and sinks his teeth too-hard into the black sea of your forearm, tongue swirling over raw, peeling skin. 

You come with just the weight of his body rubbing against you and his teeth in your skin. It’s what you wanted, it’s the proof of indelibility you need. There are no real blackouts, humanity never really sleeps, he is as dependent upon your shared past as you are, the first October you spent falling in love with Jade and pouring into your skin will always remain, no matter who sees it, no matter how many layers of black it hides beneath. 

Jade sucks spots of color onto your throat and you cannot remember the last time he tried to do that, or the last time you let him. “How can you sleep?” he asks you, thumbs in your own palms, digging half-moons into them while you thrust lazily against his body, into the still-warm slick in your briefs. “I don’t understand how you can sleep at night when you’re so fucking cruel, when you do _insane shit_ like this just to hurt me?” he begs, and his words reek of hypocrisy, they are frail and tattered with human error, so holy they are beautiful. “You are unbelievable,” he says again, eyes red-rimmed, lips swollen and bitten. 

You shake your head, weak with disbelief. “I didn’t do this to hurt you,” you tell him, the truth, at least mostly. “Not everyfucking thing is about you, Jade,” you tell him, a lie, at least mostly. “Do you ever think about how painful it is to live _covered in reminders_ of you? Of that October?” 

He laughs and it comes out wild, reckless. He drags his knee up between your legs and you are so sensitive there you cry out, shutting your eyes and canting away from his still-biting mouth, which is now fixed to the inside of your elbow. The nine-lives tattoo you both have is half-black at this point, half-eclipsed in darkness and he chews mercilessly at what is left of it, smearing the inside of your bicep and the rumpled bunch of your jacket sleeve in snot. “Of course I do. Of course. You’re so fucking self-absorbed, Dave. Of _course I do_ , we have the same fucking tattoos.” 

Jade struggles to unbuckle his belt, and when you try to help him he twists your arm in a direction its not supposed to go until you yelp and he swallows the sound with a soft, metallic mouth. Eventually he gets his jeans down around his thighs and rubs against your stomach, great, graceless bucks against a shirt that you don’t think is expensive enough to save. You just let him, hands carding through his hair, petting him condescendingly, like is is a very little boy. You’re not sure if you have seen him this depraved since he whispered those secret vows, since he started wearing that ring of light. It is not as satisfying as it used to be to break him down, but you’ll take what you can get. 

Once he comes down, panting against your shoulder and fingers smoothing across your arms, he says “You really did it. I’m not dreaming, its not going away.” His voice is dull, and he inhales raggedy, eyes tightening closed to squeeze out one last tear each. 

“Of course it’s not. Nothing is. Not even the sleeves, they’re still there. Under everything,” you tell him, half-asleep, tremendously exhausted. Your fingertips float over his neck and back, under the collar of his shirt to trace the jut of his spine. His skin is smooth, dry, old. You’re used to this by now. 

“I don’t know why, but it feels like I lost you. Like I’ve been losing you for years, but I finally _lost_ something. Officially. I dunno. Funny how much things like tattoos matter.” 

You think about secret vows, rings of light. About the notebooks in storage, the scars from his nails that you can still see on your back in the right light, one million identical fights, the way your body doesn’t know how to shut off unless he’s there to pull your plug. You blink, struggling against the tide of sleep, feeling like _of course_ tattoos matter. Everything matters, everything and nothing. 

He peels himself off of you, and you suck in air desperately, only now realizing how difficult it was to breath beneath him. Your arms throb, your throat stings. The sleepless ache in your chest triples and seethes and smolders and expands, and as you flex the fingers of your right hand, it yawns even wider. 

You half watch Jade gather himself back on the drivers side, fix his hair and his clothes and rub his mouth with the back of his hand over and over again, trying in vain to reduce the swelling in his lips, rub it out like you wish he would rub his own tattoos out, like he never will. _That’s you Dave. That’s you._

Pushing the heels of your palms into your eyes, you black your own vision out, just for a moment. “Do you want me to take you home?” Jade asks in a hoarse voice, reaching out and carefully running his finger down the topography of your forearm, wincing just as he did when you first showed it to him. “I’m sorry.” 

“I’m not. It’s fine,” you answer through a yawn, pulling your jacket off and folding it to that you can use it to cushion your head against the window, which you settle into.

“I hate it so much, but I hope it’s not fucked up permanently. I really do,” he says awkwardly, starting the car. You don’t look at him, you know his eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, and you only want their color, not the memory of it. 

_There is nothing permanent, no forever, no eternity_ , you think, though you are not entirely sure it is the truth or something you believe when it is convenient, when you cannot stand the idea of a forever without him.

LAX fades into sun and haze behind you as Jade drives you home. Your blacked out forearm throbs in time with your heartbeat like the tremor of wings, the comforting kind of pain, the pain of being alive, and you wrap yourself around it and close your eyes. Finally, etched in your map of bruises, you sleep. 

\---


End file.
